Seminar Series

Ridhi Kashyap discusses the demographic implications of one of the most striking expressions of gender inequalty — son preference. Kashyap examines both the postnatal manifestations of son preference in the form of gender gaps in mortality and health, as well as in the prenatal manifestations in the form of sex-selective abortion and sex ratio at birth distortions. Kashyap also looks at the long-term implications of son preference and sex ratio distortions for population dynamics.

Gastric cancer is the second deadliest cancer in the world, and incidence and mortality rates are highest in East Asia. Duke’s Meira Epplein discusses how she utilized new H. pylori multiplex serology to increase numbers of sero-positive results to six H. pylori proteins offered a possible new biomarker panel for gastric cancer risk in among urban men living in Shanghai, China.

There is growing evidence that the trillions of microbes that inhabit the human body have profound implications for human health. The microbiome is malleable, and it is sensitive to human environments, individual choice, and human behavior. Jen Dowd discusses her recent work on how the social environment impacts the microbiome using data from the NYC-HANES as well as the TwinsUK study. She also reviews future opportunities for future collaboration between social and biological scientists in cohorts such as AddHealth and the WLS.

Surveys have traditionally been based on the idea that researchers can estimate characteristics of a population by obtaining a sample of individuals and asking them to report about themselves. Network reporting surveys generalize this traditional approach by asking survey respondents to report about members of their personal networks. UC Berkley's Dennis Feehan discusses his framework for developing estimators from network reporting surveys and reviews the results from a nationally-representative survey experiment that he conducted in Rwanda.

Modeling and computation for multivariate longitudinal is challenging, particularly when data contain discrete measurements of different types. Motivated by data on the fluidity of sexuality from adolescence to adulthood, Duke's Amy Herring discusses her new nonparametric approach for mixed-scale longitudinal data.

Humans tend to form social relationships with others who resemble them. Whether this sorting of like with like arises from historical patterns of migration, meso-level social structures in modern society, or individual-level selection of similar peers remains unsettled. But new research suggests that unobserved genotypes may play an important role in the creation of homophilous relationships. Stanford's Ben Domingue discusses his recent work which utilized data from 9,500 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine genetic similarities among pairs of friends.

In 1960, the foreign-born population made up about 5% of the US population. By 2015, this number had increased to over 40 million and the foreign-born made up about 13% of the US population. As a result, the health and mortality of the foreign-born carry an increasing weight in estimates of health and mortality at the national, regional and local levels and among the racial/ethnic population subgroups. Irma Elo reviews evidence of the mortality levels of the foreign born, with examples of their contribution to health and mortality in the United States. This talk is Co-Sponsored by the Center for Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research (CBHDR).

Paige Harden discusses her research on childhood executive functions (EFs) in the Texas Twin Project, an ongoing study of a child and adolescent twins and multiples in central Texas. EFs are supervisory cognitive processes that modulate goal-directed cognitive operations and include inhibition, switching, updating, and working memory abilities. She also looks at her new philosophical work on the ethical and political implications of sociogenomic research linking genetic differences between people to phenotypes, such as EFs, that are relevant for social inequality. In particular, she considers how genotypes and genetically-influenced phenotypes can be understood within the framework of the philosophy of luck, and discusses how the concept of "genetic luck" can be useful for understanding the compatibility of sociogenomic research with a broad spectrum of political values and ideologies.

As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. Duke University's Gregory Samanez-Larkin discusses the effects of ageing on decision making and associated neural circuits. He also examines how “affect-integration-motivation (AIM)” framework helps clarify how motivational circuits support decision making, and reviews recent research that sheds light on whether and how ageing influences these circuits.